Curiosity Rover's Chemistry Lab Takes 1st First Taste of Mars Soil

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NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has delivered the first Martian dirt
sample to its onboard chemistry laboratory, testing out gear that
forms the scientific heart of the $2.5 billion robot.

Curiosity's huge robotic arm dropped a pinch of Red Planet dirt
into the rover's
Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM. SAM can detect
organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life
as we know it — and is thus key to Curiosity's mission, which
seeks to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting
microbial life.

SAM ingested its first soil sample on Friday (Nov. 9) at a sandy
site the rover team has dubbed Rocknest. The instrument analyzed
the dirt over the following two days using mass spectrometry, gas
chromatography and laser spectrometry, researchers said.

"We received good data from this first solid sample," SAM
principal investigator Paul Mahaffy, of NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. "We have a
lot of data analysis to do, and we are planning to get additional
samples of Rocknest material to add confidence about what we
learn."

While last Friday's activities kicked off SAM's soil analyses,
the instrument had already sniffed the Martian air several times
in a search for methane, a gas commonly produced by living
organisms here on Earth. The first few sniffs
revealed no methane, scientists announced earlier this month,
adding that Curiosity will keep hunting for the gas.

SAM and the Chemistry & Mineralogy instrument, or CheMin,
both sit inside Curiosity's body and are designed to analyze soil
samples delivered by the rover's 7.1-foot-long (2.1 meters)
robotic arm. CheMin has already studied Martian soil and received
a fresh sample from the same scoop that fed SAM, scientists said.